Fake and irresponsibly sourced diamonds are undermining confidence in the industry – sales are down. Can new technologies, such as laser etching and blockchain, reassure an increasingly sceptical public?<\/p>\n
In a lab in the California city of Carlsbad, between Los Angeles and San Diego, a suspicious diamond recently arrived.<\/p>\n
On the outer edge – what jewellers call the girdle – was a tiny inscription, of a bona fide diamond security code issued in 2015.<\/p>\n
But the font was different to the one Gemological Institute of America, or GIA, uses.<\/p>\n
And whereas the original diamond was natural, this diamond was grown in a lab.<\/p>\n
“Rarely do we encounter the type of blatant fraud described here,” say Christopher Breeding and Troy Ardon from the Carlsbad lab.<\/p>\n
Carlsbad is the headquarters of the GIA, a non-profit organisation that evaluates and certifies diamonds for quality.<\/p>\n
It assigns diamonds report numbers, which a laser can then carve on to the diamond. But this method has its problems.<\/p>\n
“It is easy to be removed, just polish it off,” says Andrew Rimmer, chief executive of Opsydia, an Oxford University spin-out. “Also it’s easy to apply someone else’s serial number.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fake and irresponsibly sourced diamonds are undermining confidence in the industry – sales are down. Can new technologies, such as laser etching and blockchain, reassure an increasingly sceptical public? In a lab in the California city of Carlsbad, between Los Angeles and San Diego, a suspicious diamond recently arrived. On the outer edge – what jewellers call the girdle – […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":186,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/demo.moralthemes.com\/blogoholic-pro-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/58\/2019\/07\/StockSnap_TJYCDEGD43-1-e1562832101607-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.moralthemes.com\/blogoholic-pro-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.moralthemes.com\/blogoholic-pro-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.moralthemes.com\/blogoholic-pro-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.moralthemes.com\/blogoholic-pro-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.moralthemes.com\/blogoholic-pro-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demo.moralthemes.com\/blogoholic-pro-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.moralthemes.com\/blogoholic-pro-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.moralthemes.com\/blogoholic-pro-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.moralthemes.com\/blogoholic-pro-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.moralthemes.com\/blogoholic-pro-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}